I sometimes get a little bit melancholic when I read about Dath Ilan. Humanity could be so much better off, but due to economic illiteracy, we can't have nice things.
Better to light a small flame than to curse the darkness. So if you had to build a model econoliterate city on earth, how would you go about it?
There's lots of micronations projects out there. What I'm interested in is:
- How do you keep the city econoliterate, immediately and a hundred years in the future.
- How do you make this practical to achieve - most micronations projects dont go anywhere, and are actively thwarted by governments.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my pen sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Dath Ilan,
In this earths green & pleasant land.
My understanding is that dath ilan hasn't solved the alignment problem but has solved the problem of getting people not to try to build AIs powerful enough to be problematic if unaligned. Apparently mostly by keeping the idea of powerful AIs secret from most of the population, which seems absurd to me. I am not sure why Eliezer thinks dath ilan could do that more effectively than it could have them know that it's possible and dangerous and then Do Something That Is Not That; both are obviously impractical on earth but I think the claimed superior abilities of dath ilan help much more with the latter than with the former.